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The Da Vinci wiki - my tribute to Leonardo
Leonardo Da Vinci was undoubtedly one of the greatest minds in the history of mankind. Some argue that because his talents spanned over so many eras - plastic arts, music, mathematics, medicine, engineering and more, Leonardo should be considered the greatest genius ever lived Indeed, Leonardo's mind seemed to have covered a whole world of interests and talents, and the fact that single mind could create so many magnificent art works and yielded so many visionary ideas, many of them way ahead of their time is really amazing. However, his extraordinary way of working is not less amazing. A wiki in a mind The fact is that Leonardo could never get anything completely done. Even his most famous art work - the Mona Lisa, was never handed to the honorable Francesco del Giocondo who ordered a portrait of his wife. Leonardo worked on the Mona Lisa off-and-on for 4 years and eventually considered it "left unfinished". The same was with all his great masterpieces. He would work on something for a while, then turn his attention to something else, then return to something he worked on before and so on. When adding this jumpy way of working to the huge diversity of his fields of interest, one may wonder how Leonardo would cope in today's world. It is almost sure that he would be considered as suffering from ADHD or something... But Leonardo was not attention-challenged, nor was his way of working disordered or random. In fact, Leonardo's work was based on an elaborated method which he followed strictly. The secret of his success was that he did not just jump from one thing to another as it would seem, but was always busy actually doing things. Leonardo's greatness is rooted in the fact that his ability to "drag and drop his thoughts" into reality was almost limitless, and where it was limited, it was by external factors such as lack of technologies or finance - but Leonardo did not allow even that to stop him. What he could not actually do, he carefully documented in his notebooks. The reason he documented his ideas was not so that others can understand them (in fact, he used some pretty clever tricks to prevent others form understanding his notes too easily and probably kept some secrets to himself. You can read in about how these tricks can help you too), but rather to save them for himself while he turned his attention to something else. Likewise, the way Leonardo turned his attention from one subject to another was not arbitrary at all. Leonardo's mind was organized like a wiki, with all his different ideas interconnected in a network of conceptual hyper links. When he turned his attention from one thing to another, it was because he either felt he encountered a problem that he should solve before he can continue with his current work, or he felt that he have found the solution to a problem that made him halt on something else. The ingenuity of this way of working, is that because he had everything either (partly) done or documented, he always knew what to return to. This is how he was able to apply his ideas in the most effective way, and sometimes in more than one way. The result was a highly effective way of thinking which is what lays behind Leonardo's ability to achieve so much in so many areas. The real Da Vinci code Over the centuries that passed since Leonardo Da Vinci lived, and as new technologies enabled it, many of his ideas and insights came into life. Flying machines became a common mean of transportation, Leonardo's understanding of the effects of aging became common knowledge, and his great artworks became icons of the western civilization. But at the same time, the cultural preference moved from the multidisciplinary approach of the Renaissance, to the highly specialized approach of today, and so it seems that Leonardo's hyper-linked and universal way of thinking, the real Da Vinci code, still waits for its time to become a common practice. Perhaps, the Internet, and especially social-web applications like the wiki is what will make that happen. This wiki is in a way, an attempt to check if this is so. Most people in modern society make a decision quite early in their life about the career they want to pursue and then spend a lifetime trying to become better and better in a very specific thing. However some of us, like myself, have a different tendency. I do not claim to have even a fraction of Leonardo's ingenuity, but the fact is that ever since I was a little child, I always had notebooks similar to the one in the picture at the top of this page, full with sketches of designs of all kind of things - from cars and aircrafts to digital gadgets, attempts to solve all kind of geometrical and mathematical problems, etc. If you have a similar mind in which ideas in all kind of areas pop up spontaneously and demand that you will actually do something with them. The Da Vinci wiki is meant for you. It is a place for people like our selfs to share our ideas and increase the chance for them to become something real, in spite of all kind of obstacles. Leonardo's notebooks will be our inspiration and the wiki technology our mean to apply his way of working --Oshani 09:33, September 19, 2009 (UTC)